New designs for data security are continually evolving to keep professional information confidential and personal information private. Controlling access to information is an important aspect of securing the safety of electronic information. Access control has been implemented by authentication mechanisms such as passwords and digital certificates, which allow a resource-controlling entity to positively identify the requesting entity or information about the entity that it requires. Other authorization examples include access control lists (ACLs) and policy-based mechanisms. These mechanisms define the entities that may access a given resource, such as files in a file system, hardware devices, database information, and so forth.
Policy-based authorization systems verify that a policy authorizes access to data before allowing a requester to gain the data access. In some applications of logic-based security policy languages, reasoning over very large (or even infinite) sets of facts may be required; thus, access control can consume an inordinate amount of resources which then negatively impact system performance and the user experience.